Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Some thoughts on Firefox

Some insight into the design philosophy of Firefox, from one of the co-designers ... who was 17 years old when he started work on the team. It's not many people who can put that on their college applications.

Equally impressive, of course, is Firefox itself. When I first saw Firefox sometime last year, my first impression was that it was very much like Safari. It turns out that I may have got the provenance wrong - apparently Safari was developed by someone who left the Firefox team. Either way, I grateful for both browsers, and for this kind of thinking:

Giving people unadulterated access to the web became something of a religion,
and every wasted pixel, button or dialog that impeded it was a demon that nagged
at us. Every time someone was “pulled out of the dream", every time they had to
stop and realize that they were using a browser called Firefox and not just the
amorphous Web,” was a personal failure.
[blakeross.com]

If only my workplace would switch to Mac, or at the least use Firefox - but I doubt this would ever happen. Thankfully, I haven't had to use IE at home for 3 years, which can only be a happy thing. IE crawls at such a pace that it makes me forget I have a broadband connection.

3 comments:

Yes, I've read that article. Opera is about the only browser I haven't downloaded and tried over the last year, having gone through Netscape, Mozilla, Camino, Firefox, and Safari. Perhaps it's time to add another horse to the stable ...